“The United States has announced today that it cannot sign the ITU regulations in their current form,” Ambassador Terry Kramer said (Kramer leads the American delegation at the conference).

He spoke just after an Internet resolution as part of the final draft had been approved by a majority of attending nations, some of whom seemed confused about whether they were actually voting on the draft proposal.

“The US delegation was apparently angered by developments in the early hours of Wednesday morning, when Russia and its allies succeeded in winning, by a mere show of hands, approval of a resolution that mentions the Internet,” TheNew York Times wrote. “The show of hands followed an attempt by [Mohamed Nasser al-Ghanim, director general of the Telecommunication Regulation Authority of the United Arab Emirates] to gauge, as he put it, ‘the temperature of the room.’”

The ambassador also said that so far, a number of other nations would either not be signing or have “significant reservations” and are consulting their governments overnight in Dubai. Those countries include the United Kingdom, Costa Rica, Denmark, Egypt, Sweden, the Netherlands, Kenya, the Czech Republic, Canada, New Zealand, and Poland—but the group may turn out to be larger.

“The United States has consistently believed and continues to believe that the ITR should be a high-level document and that the scope of the treaty does not extend to Internet governance or content,” Kramer added. “Other administrations have made it clear that they believe the treaty should be extended to include those issues, and so we cannot be part of that consensus.”

The final text of the International Telecommunications Regulations treaty that was approved has not yet been made public. It’s obvious there is a staunch divide between Washington and a number of its allies, vis-à-vis other countries who are in favor of more national control of the Internet (most notably Russia, China, and their allies).

“It is clear that the world community is at a crossroad in its collective view of the Internet and of the most optimal environment flourishing of the Internet in this century,” he added. “No single organization or government can or should attempt to control the Internet or dictate its future development.”

On the conference call, Ars was able to ask why such international affirmation was even needed, when China, Iran, Syria and others routinely unilaterally impose restrictions on their domestic Internet.

“Countries have national sovereignty rights—they can do what they want,” Kramer said. “What we don't want over time is a set of global agreements that people can point to and say: ‘Listen, you know, this treaty gave us the right to impose these terms on global operators of some sort.’ We don't think that this will happen per se, it's not legally binding, but you don't want something to happen where people can think it is a binding term in a global environment.”

Cyrus Farivar
Cyrus is the Senior Business Editor at Ars Technica, and is also a radio producer and author. His latest book, Habeas Data, about the legal cases over the last 50 years that have had an outsized impact on surveillance and privacy law in America, is due out in May 2018 from Melville House. Emailcyrus.farivar@arstechnica.com//Twitter@cfarivar

So...ACTA is good, yet the ITU regulations which may be worse, but contain different language but is still intended to allow some or all of the same controls ACTA tried to put in place for the US only is bad?

I have some shocking news for you Drizzt321: governments are in fact composed of more then one person! Whoa! I'll give you a minute to get your heart rate under control there. This little known fact seems to confuse many people in internet forums, but is nevertheless true. These "organizations" are composed of multiple people and even sub-groups, and these different groups can in fact have wildly different views on certain subjects even while they're all part of a single overall entity. Keeping this in mind, it tends to be best to evaluate various proposals and actions by more independent means in addition to simply looking at what other departments are doing. The results may surprise you!

So...ACTA is good, yet the ITU regulations which may be worse, but contain different language but is still intended to allow some or all of the same controls ACTA tried to put in place for the US only is bad?

I have some shocking news for you Drizzt321: governments are in fact composed of more then one person! Whoa! I'll give you a minute to get your heart rate under control there. This little known fact seems to confuse many people in internet forums, but is nevertheless true. These "organizations" are composed of multiple people and even sub-groups, and these different groups can in fact have wildly different views on certain subjects even while they're all part of a single overall entity. Keeping this in mind, it tends to be best to evaluate various proposals and actions by more independent means in addition to simply looking at what other departments are doing. The results may surprise you!

Yes, I know, but while governments (mostly) are not monolithic, the current administration has generally pursued an agenda of tightening control over the Internet in various ways in the name of the content industries, while this ITU regulations, at least this part of it on the surface to me, more or less gives the government (at least those who sign onto it) free authority to do whatever. Yet the administration (or am I wrong, and it's the Senate?) is running in the opposite direction seemingly because it's mostly coming from other countries with (generally) a history of censorship and attempts of thought control which is similar in some ways to what they wanted to do in the name of the content industries.

I was just trying to point out (if I'm correct about who is representing the US, and the meaning of the ITU language) that the administration is being somewhat hypocritical. Not that it's really surprising to me. Just wanted to bring it up.

So...ACTA is good, yet the ITU regulations which may be worse, but contain different language but is still intended to allow some or all of the same controls ACTA tried to put in place for the US only is bad? It could easily be I'm mis-interpreting what the proposed ITU language is about.

I think the difference is that ACTA favors Western media companies, while (among other things) the proposed ITU treaty disfavors those companies with regard to peering and the like.

So...ACTA is good, yet the ITU regulations which may be worse, but contain different language but is still intended to allow some or all of the same controls ACTA tried to put in place for the US only is bad? It could easily be I'm mis-interpreting what the proposed ITU language is about.

I think the difference is that ACTA favors Western media companies, while (among other things) the proposed ITU treaty disfavors those companies with regard to peering and the like.

Oh, ok. Guess I had somewhat of a mis-understanding of the ITU treaty proposal.

This whole thing feels a bit detached. So this thing passed, even under protest. Just what does that mean for everyone? The oppressive regimes will continue to do what they did before. the US is taking their ball and going home. What about the sender pays scheme that was being suggested previously? Did that end up going anywhere? I guess the bad thing is this is the first step in legitimizing the ITU as an entity that can control the Internet.

I'm glad that my country (Poland) didn't sign the document, but I fear that they didn't do it due to their incompetence and inability to do the formal stuff rather than understating the topic and having objections. I hope I'm wrong.

I'm glad that my country (Poland) didn't sign the document, but I fear that they didn't do it due to their incompetence and inability to do the formal stuff rather than understating the topic and having objections. I hope I'm wrong.

as long as my processors uses polish notaion, my OS code is written in Hungarian notation, my security protocol uses the Chinese remainder theorem, and Nullable<T> implements Russian logic... we'll all get along just fine under the UN/ITU.

Are you seriously claiming that heavy-handed enforcement of copyright that rarely victimizes innocent content hosts is just as bad as political and religious censorship? The former is deplorable, to be sure, but the latter is much worse. Let's applaud every country that opposed the power grab, as they've been absolutely correct in this instance.

I think the difference is the US wants to restrict distribution based on content ownership, while other countries want to do so based on the content's message.

The silly part is pretending that 'the Internet' is one system. It gives that illusion, but countries are already free to do what they want with systems within their borders. And the various backbones and their peering agreements are also free to do what they want within their countries' laws.

Thank god for US, Canada and UK. Seems that rest of EU couldn't say no to more control over internet and more tracking of it's citizens.

I know that this is similar to ACTA and all, but who cares. Both got defeated and why and how are just philosophical questions. Main thing is that internet is kept as far away from government as is possible. The way it's working now seems to be excellent. Meritocracy has always been, by far, the most efficient way to govern things.

What is the EU stance on this? It wasn't mentioned in the list of countries with reservations about the proposal and I hope this doesn't mean they would be OK with this.

Until recently all news reports were saying that EU was sticking with US but suddenly there is nothing about it. Considering the EU governments and how horny they are for more control over internet I'm not overly surprised. In this respect we are far worse than US.

There's a quote in there too about this ACTA vs ITU discrepancy. National Sovereignty being what it is, the U.S. position is that countries can and will do what they want domestically (such as ACTA) but as the ITU ITR are so high level, they could provide a basis for those kind of domestic restrictions getting applied internationally. I suppose its not too far off of the "states' rights" argument we have in the U.S. regarding Federal vs State powers.

“Countries have national sovereignty rights—they can do what they want,” Kramer said. “What we don't want over time is a set of global agreements that people can point to and say: ‘Listen, you know, this treaty gave us the right to impose these terms on global operators of some sort.’ We don't think that this will happen per se, it's not legally binding, but you don't want something to happen where people can think it is a binding term in a global environment.”

Sure, he says he doesn't want a treaty like this signed that could possibly be used in ways that we (the US) see as "bad", but when other treaties are brought up with wording that we could use in a "bad" way according to other nations' values, it's a matter of them being whiny infringers that are dirty pirating thieves and trying to kill all the music and all the movies and all the books everywhere!

Forgive me for not valuing such ambassadors' views on international treaties anymore.

Are you seriously claiming that heavy-handed enforcement of copyright that rarely victimizes innocent content hosts is just as bad as political and religious censorship? The former is deplorable, to be sure, but the latter is much worse. Let's applaud every country that opposed the power grab, as they've been absolutely correct in this instance.

I'm guessing this is not a criticism of the US position at the ITU or an argument that ACTA is "just as bad", but rather it's a complaint about "why couldn't you have taken a principled pro-freedom stance in BOTH cases instead of just the ITU case?"